The present invention relates to a method of recognizing characters. The term "character" is used herein in its broadest meaning, to include not only conventional alpha-numeric characters, but also various symbols, such as mathematical, scientific, phonetic, shorthand, etc., symbols. The method of the present invention is particularly useful for recognizing handwritten characters in real-time, and is therefore described below with respect to this application.
Many character recognition methods have been described in the literature for recognizing both pre-printed characters off-line and handwritten characters on-line. A good review of the previously proposed methods is described in the article "The State of the Art in On-Line Handwriting Recognition" by C. C. Tappert, C. Y. Suen, and T. Wakahara, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 12, No.8, August 1990, Pages 787-808. This article lists 286 prior publications as references.